The Opening of the Court—The Old Woman of Gilmerton.[5]
The house which went by the name of Log’s lodging-house, and which was occupied by William Hare, as raised by the favour of the widow to the elevation of landlord, was, as already said, situated in Tanner’s Close,—one of those narrow passages that wind from the north side of the West Port. The entry from the street begins with a descent of a few steps, and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you came—for the house, which was rased for shame, is no longer to be seen—to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye, have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, “Beds to let,” as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to come out alive, distinguished it still more. The outer apartment was large, occupied all round by these structures called beds, composed of knocked-up fir stumps, and covered with a few gray sheets and brown blankets, among which the squalid wanderer sought rest, and the profligate snored out his debauch under the weight of nightmare. Another room opening from this was also comparatively large, and furnished much in the same manner. In place of any concealment being practised, so far impossible, indeed, in the case of a public lodging-house, the door stood generally open, and, as we have said, the windows were overlooked by the passengers up and down; but as the spider’s net is spread open while his small keep is a secret hole, so here there was a small apartment, or rather closet, the window of which looked upon a pig-sty and a dead wall, and into which, as we know, were introduced those unhappy beings destined to death. The very character of the house, the continued scene of roused passions, saved it from that observation which is directed towards temporary tumults, so that no surprise could have been excited by cries of suffering issuing from such a place, even if they could have been heard from the interior den; and that was still more impossible, from the extraordinary mode of extinguishing life adopted by the wary and yet unwary colleagues. In this inner apartment Burke used to work when he did work, which, always seldom, soon came to be rare, and eventually relinquished for other wages.
It will thus be seen that this small dark room was the appropriate place where the words of secrecy would pass to the ear, or be blurted forth, coarse and broken, under the fevered brain of drunkenness. Since ever that night when the £7, 10s. flared its magnetic influence over their eyes, and was communicated, by confidence and sympathy, to the two females, the little world of this quaternity was changed. The women saw that other lodgers would die, and the inspiring hope, not so demoniac as to curdle the remaining drops of human kindness that refused to leave the female breast, pointed in the inevitable direction of gaudy finery, which they might flaunt in the wondering eyes of the poor people of Portsburgh; but so slow a process did not suit the inflamed passions of the men. Hare had been revolving in his mind a scheme to set up his own will as the arbiter of the occasion, which would secure more money, even as he wished it; and the secret of this talisman behoved to be communicated to his friend, now poor and miserable, and dissolved in habits of sloth and inebriety. It was in that small room, and while the two women were engaged in the front apartments, that this mystic rite was performed between the solitary inmates, over, as might be expected, the caldron fires of drink. Yes, the mouth found power to utter the words which came as the dictates of a mere desire for money, that they should seize the opportunity so often presented to them of people lying drunk and senseless, and deprive them, by suffocation, of life. The proposition was accepted under the same approving auspices of mammon, who had already made both his own; and under the force of that temptation involved in the words which had been uttered in Surgeon’s Square, offering a welcome to a return with a similar burden to that of the pensioner. You may cease to indulge here in those visions of the fancy which would represent human nature in convulsions, panting under the impression of a thought which, at first, produced a revolt, and then became conciliated. The “make” of each of these men was perfect under its own conditions, and if there was any seriousness, it was only a passing fear that they might bring their necks into jeopardy. Pity, which never lived in them, could not be said to be dead; the impress of the first money had burned into their souls; the welcome of the doctors rung in their ears; and Grace, studying them in the distance, had flown past them as an impossibility.
There is reason to believe that this resolution come to by these men, sitting together in this dark room, passed as an element into an orgy, different from all those in which they had so often indulged, if not from any that the world ever witnessed; nor was it modified, if it was not inflamed, by those visions of struggling nature expiring among their hands, which, rising as mere spectral forms, disappeared as soon before the images they pictured of a life of sensual indulgence and enervating sloth. If the project had sprung out of the ebullitions of intoxicated passions, it might have died away on the morrow, but, the result of calculation, it only received strength from the hopes which it roused, and which again were inflamed by the celebration. Nay, time, as day by day passed without a likely lodger coming in, increased the desire to begin, and chafed them into impatience. Hare accordingly resolved to commence prowling about the streets for some promising individual whom he might seduce into the house, and for some days he followed this occupation, but his efforts failed, and the report at night only again inflamed the desire of the morning. One afternoon, it was in December 1827, he again betook himself to the street, and for hours dodged about searching among the poor and miserable for some one who, already intoxicated, might offer those facilities to a beginner which were afterwards held of small account when practice gave proficiency and success confidence. At last he observed in the Grassmarket a decent-looking elderly woman (Abigail Simpson, as afterwards ascertained) whose wandering eye and irregular step shewed that she had got more of the publican’s drug than her perhaps weak head could carry. His eye was immediately fixed upon her, and the old smile, which always obeyed the bidding of an evil thought, played over his face, nor did he let her out of his sight as he dogged her irregular movements from place to place. He could see that she was poor, that she was probably friendless, and, above all, that she was tipsy, and he knew enough of degraded nature to tell him what the proverb has settled, Qui a bu boira,—he who has drunk will drink more. Making up to her, he introduced himself as one who had met her before, and to his delight, discovered that she was inclined to be communicative, if not garrulous. It was not a difficult matter to advise her to accompany him to his house, where he would treat her with the old bribe of “a dram.” So away they trudged together, the dissembler taking special care as he went to keep her on her course, from which she was every moment inclined to stray, by professions of interest and friendship.
Arrived at the lodging-house, the woman was introduced to Burke, with what looks between the two may easily be imagined, as an old friend, and drink was immediately procured. There was now a party which was joined by the two women, who, when they saw the men plying the stranger with whisky—the full value of which their difficulty in getting it to the extent they desired was sufficiently known to them—must have been aware that there was at the bottom of this generosity more than the friendship professed by men dead to the feeling, even as regards those who might have had a claim to it. The time passed, and the party became merry, nor was the stranger the least joyous of them, for had she not fallen among friends by sheer accident? and should she not prove her gratitude by being happy, ay, and communicating to them all her secrets? Was she not fortunate in being able to tell them that she was a pensioner of a gentleman in the New Town, who paid her regularly one shilling and sixpence a-week, besides little gratuities, such as the can of kitchen-fee she carried with her, and put aside till she should depart? Yes, and more, that she was blessed with a fine young daughter she had left at home, and who would be anxiously waiting her return. And then that daughter was not only good, she was beautiful, and the very pride of her soul. All this Hare heard; and he could carry out the play she had begun, even amidst the intentions he entertained, by expressing an interest in the mother’s paragon, so deeply felt, that, being unmarried, he would put in for her hand, provided the mother would consent. And consent she did, so far as her condition would allow, and here, newly forged, was another bond of friendship. Nay, when he and the daughter should have become man and wife, it behoved that they could not live without the good old mother—who, accordingly, would take up her residence with them, with no more cares of poverty, and no dependence upon the pensioning gentleman of the New Town.
Could any human creature be more happy? Nor were the actors less so, though for a reason so very different. But the drink went done, even with the forbearance of the men, that she who would pay so dearly for it should have enough for their purpose. Mrs Hare had money, and there was the can of kitchen-fee, which the stranger could sell, and take home with her—when the time came—the price, one and sixpence, to help her little pension, and get a dram at another time, when they would not be there to give it to her. Then, to make the play even more merry and ingenious, this small sum was, very soon after, again, taken from the now almost unconscious woman’s pocket, and laid out on more spirits, that the expected opportunity might be made more propitious. The scene progressed with even increased symptoms of noisy merriment. The old woman revived, and, under so many influences bearing on a kindly heart, did her best to sing some of her old songs—household words to her, no doubt, and feelings as well, with which she often at home wiled back the days of her youth, and charmed the ear of that daughter of whom she was so proud and so fond. Nay, we have the hearsay of the day for saying, that Burke contributed his part, singing, as he was so much in the habit of doing, some of those airs, generally, according to the account of those who knew him, sentimental, if not melancholy.
And here we are obliged absolutely to stop for a moment, not that we wish to intrude upon the reader a moralising spirit, where every word suggests a sermon out of more hardened things than stones, but that we are mystified, and are inclined to ask counsel. Could that man have had any sense of the beautiful in the sentiments of these lyrics which, it was said, he sang with feeling, if not pathos? Can it be possible that such a sense can be consistent with a demoralisation such as his? We suspect that it is. We are led to expect its impossibility by a reference to opposite, if not antagonistic, feelings: we cannot love and hate the same object. This is true, and would seem to disprove our proposition à priori. We can reconcile the contradiction only by having recourse to the different faculties of the imagination and the sense. The poet who has ravished his readers by a description of the beauty of female virtue and innocence has been found in a brothel. One of the most touching religious poems in the world has been sung by one who, among brawling revellers, maligned religion and its votaries. The praises of temperance have been enchantingly poured forth by a bacchanal. The oppressor of the poor has wept at a representation of affecting generosity. Any one may fill up the list without perhaps including a hypocrite. The imagination has its emotions, and the sense its feelings, or, perhaps, no feelings. The why and the wherefore touch the ultimate, and we are lost; but the fact remains, as proved by evidence, that William Burke could, in song, be pathetic.
Recurring to our real tragedy, the effect of the drink soon again sent the creature from her lyrics into a condition which might have suited the purpose of the men; but whether it was that, as beginners, they lost courage, or that lodgers came in and defeated their intentions, they failed that night in effecting their object. The unconscious woman was lifted into a bed, where she lay till the morning. A severe sickness was the consequence of the importunities of her new-made friends; and the colleagues, exasperated by their defeat of the previous night, were alongside of the bed, with offerings of sympathy, and more drink. In the midst of all this, she cried that she wished to get home to her beloved daughter, at the very time that she weakly accepted that which incapacitated her. By and by, the lodgers for the night began to leave the house; and the victim being once more reduced to unconsciousness, they fell to their work in the precise manner they had planned. Hare laid hold of the apertures of breathing, and Burke throwing himself on her body to repress struggles and keep down the ribs, maintained his position till the last sob escaped from the oppressed lungs; and the woman, after a struggle of fully a quarter of an hour, was a corpse. In the evening the body was conveyed to Surgeon’s Square, and ten pounds procured for it.